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Democracy After the Shutdown

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Here’s the question we should be asking ourselves right now: What next?

Even if the immediate crises — the partial shutdown and the looming debt default — are resolved, we will still be living in a dangerous political moment. The danger in question is because of the recent emergence of a political philosophy — and I mean that in the loosest sense — which threatens to unravel our joint commitment to a common democratic enterprise.

If government is the problem, shutting it down is a logical solution. We need to confront that idea.

What is the “political philosophy” I have in mind? The conservative writer John Tamny at Forbes.com puts it this way: “It quite simply must be asked,” he writes, “what the point of the Republican Party is if it’s not regularly shutting down the federal government?” No point at all, Tamny seems to think, suggesting that “shutdown should be a part of the G.O.P.’s readily unsheathed arsenal of weapons meant to always be shrinking the size and scope of our economy-asphyxiating federal government.”

It is tempting to call this “crazy talk” and unserious bluster. But it is serious, and it shows that some people are thinking about what happens next. It is a plan that represents the logical limit of the views now being entertained on the radical right, not just in the dark corners of the Internet, but in the sunlight of mainstream forums. After all, if the government is the problem, shutting it down is a logical solution. So rather than dismissing this idea, we should confront it. And we can begin to do so by asking a simple question: What are the consequences of this strategy — one that urges us to explicitly pull out of a shared contract of governance?

There are, I think, two clear consequences. The first concerns the social contract itself. It was Thomas Hobbes who most famously argued that our political obligations to one another are based on an implicit agreement — a contract that develops out of the idea that if we act as a body, and put aside some of our personal interests in the interests of that body, we are all better off.

The contemporary philosopher Margaret Gilbert has argued that this is an extension of an even more basic idea: that social groups — including political societies — exist as a result of what she calls “joint commitments” by those who constitute them. A joint commitment is the result of two or more people expressing a readiness to do something together as a unit — like dancing a waltz, performing a play or starting a business. You don’t, Gilbert emphasizes, always have to engage in a joint commitment deliberately — in the sense of saying out loud, “Let’s do this together.” Often we express our willingness to act together only implicitly: as I might if I just held out my hand to you and gestured toward the dance floor. But however individuals express their readiness to jointly commit, their expression must be common knowledge to all: it must be something that is so taken for granted in the sense that everyone, or most everyone, knows that everyone else knows about it. Without that common knowledge, we won’t regard ourselves as being in this all together. That is, once I think that not everyone is committed, then I may stop feeling committed as well.

Now, you might doubt how many joint commitments we really make in the political sphere. Contracts involve consent and few of us consent — implicitly or otherwise — to most of what our government does. (David Hume dismissed the social contract view as akin to saying that if I was drugged and smuggled about a ship, I still “implicitly consent” to being under the authority of the captain — something Hume found ridiculous).

But even if the social contract idea is wrong as a theory of specific political obligations generally, it is helpful on one point at least. It is hard to imagine a functioning democratic institution most of whose members, at least, aren’t jointly committed to keeping the democracy running even when there is disagreement over which direction it should travel.

To repeat, it is not the shutdown itself that threatens the unraveling of our being jointly committed in this way. The government has shut down before and survived. Nor is the breakdown in normal legislative negotiations — because one side has, as it were, left the dance floor. It has to do with the fact that it is no longer common knowledge among the citizens of this country — left, right and center — that most everyone is willing to act together as a single political society. The real damage is caused by the idea that that our current democratic form of government should be shuttered. For that raises the question of whether it should be around at all. And once people begin to wonder whether the government is something that other citizens are taking seriously — even if they aren’t — the idea that we are all in this together can vanish.

Now it is very possible — I think in fact, very likely — that many Tea Party conservatives don’t see themselves as being in the same boat with the rest of us. They don’t want to engage in a social contract with “those people” — people who might need the government’s help to procure health care, for example. And that can lead to the idea that Tamny seems to have embraced: regular shutdowns are the best way to limit not only the size of the federal government but also the scope of obligations we have to one another. Of course, it is also true that many conservatives don’t want to go this far. But if so, then they would be wise to realize that the “regular shutdown” strategy has a second consequence — one that follows on the heels of the first.

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That second consequence is that the unraveling of our joint commitments isn’t going to end the federal government. What it threatens to do is to alter the remaining democratic fibers of that institution. Shutdowns are a failure of governance, and even short ones weaken the legislative branch, the branch that is most directly linked, as its members like to say, to the will of the people. But there are other branches of government, including of course, the executive branch, and the growing (and increasingly independent) apparatus of the security state. The National Security Agency doesn’t just disappear when the Congress grinds to a halt.

Should shutdowns, debt-ceiling fights and the radical political legislative gridlock they represent really become a fixture of American political life, it will be more tempting, more reasonable, to think that someone should “step in” to make the decisions. The chorus calling for action — for the president, for example, to go around the Congress — will only increase. If you are on the left, and Obama is still in power, you may even tell yourself that is a good thing. But it is a bad precedent, the type of precedent that causes democracies to erode.

Social contracts don’t have to be made for democratic intentions. After all, Hobbes himself was no democrat: he thought the body politic was best headed by a monarch.

In the end, that’s the real danger we are now facing. Not just the shutdown, but the rise of the shutdown strategy. By unraveling the threads of our joint commitment to shared governance, it raises the chances those threads will be rewoven into something else: something deeply, and tragically, undemocratic.

Michael P. Lynch is a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the author of “In Praise of Reason” and “Truth as One and Many.” He is at work on a new book, “Prisoners of Babel: Knowledge in the Datasphere.” Twitter @Plural_truth.

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The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. Please include “The Stone” in the subject field.